Engaging web site visitors in a timely manner with the correct customer engagement (e.g., presenting a discount offer on a product to a web site visitor who has shown interest in the product; extending an invitation to a web site visitor to chat with a sales agent, technical support, subject matter expert, etc.; providing additional related information on a product, etc.) has been proven to result in an increase in sales as well as overall customer satisfaction.
Some existing approaches to customer engagement rely on rules to determine when, how, and with whom to engage. For example, specific engagement rules may be built and used by a web server hosting a web site to determine whether to engage a web site visitor based upon information known about the visitor or based upon the visitor's behavior on the web site. This may be done by tracking a number of times a visitor has been to a web site, their flow through the web site, the length of time they've been on a particular web page or the web site, or an action they took while visiting the web site, such as downloading a white paper from the web site. Once a predetermined criterion or threshold defined in an engagement rule (which may be stored in a rules database at the server side) has been met, the web site visitor may be presented (e.g., by the server via a user interface on a client device) with an invitation to chat with a representative of the web site.
With prior approaches to customer engagement, engagement rules may also be defined for a web site to provide some kind of engagement offer(s) to a web site visitor based on specific information known about the web site visitor such as their “status,” products in their shopping cart, or cart value. Like the engagement rules, such engagement offers are often predetermined and stored at the server side and selected for presentation to a web site visitor in real time based on non-contextual information about the web site visitor such as the number of visits by the web site visitor, the length of time the web site visitor has spent on a web page, etc. Contextual information from the web page may have no impact on the web site server's decision to engage the web site visitor.
Furthermore, building engagement rules often requires web site administrators to have technical expertise in web site technologies, including authoring languages such as the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) used to create documents on the World Wide Web and style sheet languages such as the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. For example, to create an engagement rule for a web page, a web site administrator would need to be able to read and understand the source code for the web page, which may be written in HTML or another markup language, and know how to write CSS selectors to implement the engagement rule, with the understanding the limitations of CSS (e.g., there is currently no way to name a CSS rule, so it is not possible to create client-side scripts that refer to CSS rules). As such, building site rules can be an extremely technical, tedious, and error-prone process.